Health Insurance for Adult Children? Not so fast…

In late April I blogged about the new health reform law that goes into effect Sept. 23 allowing parents to keep an adult child on their health plan until age 26. But, what many people – my wife and me included – did not realize is that the new rules allow employers to wait until the start of the next plan year (typically January 1) before allowing parents to add adult children to their coverage.

We discovered this while looking into a short-term insurance policy for our 24-year-old son who is impacted by this law. We were quite surprised to learn the law is different than we first thought.

The period of time during which the new graduate will not have health insurance could be longer than first anticipated. Check with your insurance company or the administrator of your insurance plan to see if they are offering coverage during this gap. Even before the new rules kick in, many insurers are allowing graduating students to remain on their parents’ policy, but if your graduate will be dropped upon graduation, be sure to get a short-term insurance policy for them to cover the gap. Health insurance for young adults is relatively inexpensive. A policy with a high deductible for someone in their 20s can cost less than $100 a month in Wisconsin.

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

Related

This entry was posted on May 18, 2010 at 12:01 pm and is filed under healthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.